Since new protest movements have been cropping up worldwide, often quite unforeseen and bursting with inexhaustible energy, many people in the artistic-cultural sphere who feel solidarity with these movements are faced with a number of explosive questions: can contemporary art advance the resistance against fraudulent economic structures if it has itself a definite share in them? Or have the true potentials of art – i.e. the difficult, the nonconformist – already been liquidated behind the façades of its spaces still conceived as free? Must not the project of a political aesthetics transcending all activism suitable for media exploitation be considered aborted and suppressed? In our view, this historic aporia now needs to primed for artistic imaginations of a political subject embracing novel forms and formats.

Wiener Festwochen 2013 will dedicate the exhibition Unrest of Form to these forms and formats. For this group show, all Secession rooms and adjacent exhibition areas at both the Academy of Fine Arts and the MuseumsQuartier will be transformed into a parcours – a walking tour that explores the agora of the future at the interface between visual and performing arts. For the duration of the exhibition, this parcours will be enlivened on a temporary basis by artistic interventions, lectures, concerts and performances as well as by ten political speeches given by Austrian authors, who will address the present or future political situation through a fictitious identity – a language experiment – to thematise what is wrong in the public discourse or missing from it, and to try to pinpoint the blind spot of politics. These speeches – each of approx. 15 min. duration – will be given by the authors and/or performers in different exhibition venues and repeated on certain days.

In the freiraum quartier21 at MuseumsQuartier there will not only be permanent installations by various artist but also temporary performances within the context of the exhibition walking tour. The performers will be the English artist Tim Etchells, the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué and the Belgian group Ontroerend Goed, just to name a few. The Turkish artists’ collective Group P consisting of Antonio Cosentino, Burak Delier, Elmas Deniz, Ínci Furni, Mustafa Erdem Ozler and others will reside at the Freiraum and use it as starting point for their artistic interventions in the public space of the MuseumsQuartiers.

Unrest of Form is part of the project „Politics of Form. The re-discovery of the political subject, carried out by Wiener Festwochen, Württembergischem Kunstverein Stuttgart and Bergen Assembly, supported by the European Commission.